Be an advocate for users. Politely question what's motivating improvements. Are improvements driven from hard data or the soft notions of some muckity-muck over in operations? Resist your tendency to join the feature frenzy.

Let yourself be dragged kicking and screaming before you contribute to BAD user experience by layering in Over-Featured Confusion.

Over-Featured Confusion

Case in point of Over-Featured Confusion is LinkedIn's new and improved Discussions feature.

Laudably, LinkedIn has steadily rolled out features that have improved our group experience. Until now...

LinkedIn's new Discussions feature amounts to a ball of confusion. The most glaring improvement is a horizontal slider bar with options to Like, Pass, Comment or More? as a mashup of blog, news and discussion items scroll past (horizontally).

At best, it's confusing. At worst, it's unusable.

May I Pass on this colossal FAIL by LinkedIn? No.

Did my feedback to LinkedIn about this improvement disappear into a black hole? Probably.

We need to understand how people think, and what motivates them to behave in certain ways. The best way to do this is to design from the outside in. To observe people in their own environment, probing them so that we understand their behavior. This understanding enables us to design things that are meaningful and valuable to people.